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Hunter ch. 1: Evans
Posted By: LordsFire<EarthMartianSpaceBob@hotmail.com>
Date: 29 December 2004, 12:05 AM
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(Authors note; this is a character set up. I expect to use this character a lot, so I intend to clearly define him.)
Last of my kin, last of my blood. In the UNSC I am called Evans, although that is not my real name. When the covenant glassed my home, they killed all of my family, except for me. I am the only one to leave the planet since our family first came there, because my blood boiled hotter than the others in my family. And in my family, if you could not hold yourself in check constantly, someone would die.
We have been trained as warriors for as far back as any could remember, and are dangerous for it. In this age of space-flight and precision firearms, few would consider edged steel a viable weapon. I have trained with it all my life.
I first joined the Core for a reason my fellow soldiers would not believe, before I stopped answering when they asked. I have been trained to be a blademaster, so is it not natural I should want to lay my hands upon one of the Covenant energy blades? Strange reasoning to others, but most of my life has revolved around a blade, so it is entirely logical to me.
The other strange trait of our family is what others would consider our dual nature. Though we embrace anachronistic weaponry, we also are masters of modern technology, at least those branches we are concerned with. We have long been fascinated with any upgrade provided to armor that we could, and my armor is the product of generations of work.
All members of my family had armor suits of similar origin to mine, although drastically disimilar design. The common traits of our family armor in recent generations are twofold; first that they cover full body when we wear the full suit, and secondly that they are ideally suited to our combat neccessity and style. My father who was an archer and endurance runner, wore light scale mail of a titanium alloy. It was durable, and would stop regular slug bullets, while offering little restriction to movement and remaining a manageable weight.
My own armor was somewhat more complex in manufacture. It would be classified as light plate-mail, and is formed of overlapping titanium plates, varying in size with their location. This part of the crafting was fairly simple, the complex part came later, when I announced my intention to join the UNSC.
On my 17th birthday, I announced my intention to join the UNSC on my 18th birthday. My father looked accross the roast on the dinner table, and said, "You're armor's gonna need some work, and your sharpshooting." He must have known, and approved. If he hadn't, he would have done everything possible to keep me on planet. He did push me harder in my studies though. I didn't see how metallurgy, A.I. algorithms and photon/wave manipulation would be important as a soldier grunt, but the topics had held my interest. It had always fascinated me how metal was forged, and for some reason I had it in my head that studying AI's would help me understand the human mind.
So on my eighteenth birthday I arrived at the UNSC recruiting office wearing a full suit of quartz coated Titanium plate mail, with my helmet under my arm, and my sword, now edged with synthetic diamond, in its sheath on my belt.
Needless to say, I got quite a reaction. I think they told the drill seargant at boot camp to be particularly hard on me. It took a while to get used to not being allowed to yell back, but their idea of endurance training seemed laughable after what my father had but me through. The fact that I seemed to find their endurance training laughable is probably why I ended up in the ODST's. I volunteered straight out of boot camp, figuring, what the hey, it's the best chance at combat I've got. Closer to the front lines I am, the better my chances of finding an energy blade.
I did not realize how dull it was being a weapon at rest. I was assigned to the In Amber Cladwhich was pretty much permanently parked in orbit of earth. I spent most of my time either training with sword or for endurance, or continuing my studies. I did not gain much additional knowledge of Metallurgy, but I did learn a great deal about AI's. The ship's AI also seemed bored with its task of running what was pretty much a giant parked car, and had no problem with conversing regularly, and even let me have a look at her data arrays a couple times. Her name was Amy, and her chosen avatar was a blond woman clad in an emerald green robe, with a deep green cloak.
From the time I shipped aboard the In Amber clad I pretty much slept, ate, excercised, spoke with Amy, and then slept again. It was mind numbingly dull. Finally, a break in the rythm came when a ship returned by roundabout way from Halo, and brought some booty with it. Most the other Marines were abubble with rumors of what had happened at Halo, and the Spartan who had apparently blown it up. To believe the rumors, the Spartan had been woken from Cryo just in time to kill half a thousand or so Covenant boarders on the Pillar of Autumn, then saved every marine and crewmember who had bailed out from it. Following this, he single handedly stormed a landed covenant cruiser, leaving piles of barely recongnizable covenant corpses along his path. He retrieved Captain Keyes, then promptly went off to locate Halo's control center, kill another jillion covenant troops around it, and find the Flood. The flood, according to rumor, were uglier than my mother, stronger than my underarm odor, and about as pleasant as a marines socks after ten days wear. Of course, the Spartan ripped them apart with his bare hands, Rescued Keyes again, but Keyes was either dead, turned into flood, or turned out to be a prophet in disguise. Either way, the Spartan blew up the ring, either by talking some AI called the guilty fart to death, or blowing the POA's engines, or farting while a grunt was having a smoke behind him.
Whatever had happened, what really captured my interest was that some Active Camoflouge modules had been captured, and I hadn't been able to do any photon/wave experimentation in a while. I applied for leave to Cairo station, where they were going to be undergoing their first set of experiments. As I hadn't taken a leave since I joined, I got precedence and was on Cairo station when the boredom of life broke.
A covenant fleet decided to swing through the neighbourhood, and crash the party.
end of chapter. (Yes, I KNOW there is no action so far, but I started writing this at 3 AM, and don't have the remaining mental acuity to switch gears to combat mode. I'll write the fighting in the morning.)
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